by Kimberly K. Egan, MHC President (a version of this article was first published in the February 2025 Equiery)

The year 1990 was a big one. The Soviet Union fell, the Persian Gulf War began, and Nelson Mandela went free. The San Francisco Forty-Niners won the Superbowl, Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U hit the top of the charts, and . . . The Equiery was born.

Four hundred issues ago, in December 1990, Crystal Brumme Pickett and Mercedes Clemens took a chance on a new print magazine that Pickett called a “portable tack shop/feed store bulletin board, with a free Directory of Riding Stables at its heart.”
That first issue was published on newsprint and included the stable directory. The Coming Events section was added in the second issue. Pickett compiled the stable directory from the Yellow Pages, tack shops, and bulletin boards. She “sold” classifieds by answering every horse-for-sale advertisement in The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun and offering to run an ad for that horse in The Equiery for free. By the third issue, The Equiery included a trainer directory. The popular Out & About pages followed thereafter.

Clemens was the “IT whiz” who handled production – an entirely different process in 1990 than it is now. There was no world wide web, there were no email distribution programs, and mobile phones were the size of small suitcases and very expensive. The state-of-the-art publishing software was Adobe PageMaker. Clemens took photographs to the printer to be half-toned (a printing technique that uses dots to create the appearance of continuous tones) so that she could physically paste them into the layouts. Fax machines were cutting edge. The Equiery needed to convince its clients to purchase them so that the clients could proof their ads in time for publication. The Equiery innovated with pre-purchased advertising discounts

The Equiery’s database of over 40,000 Maryland horse industry contacts was built with shoe leather and elbow grease, one mailing address at a time, with one of the earliest versions of the new database program from Apple called FileMaker. Four hundred issues later, The Equiery’s database is still in FileMaker, albeit in the cloud and not on a server in the office.

The Equiery grew as a stand-alone magazine for 28 years. Then, in late 2018, the Maryland Horse Council purchased it; kept the popular features such as Out and About, the service directories, and the calendar of events; and added new features designed to share our work with our hundreds of members and with the general public. We started a regular column about our Industry Professional members, a monthly Trails Stewardship column, a Government Relations column, and a Farm Stewardship column. We post original content on our website, and we reach wider and more varied audiences through our social media channels.

In December of this year, The Equiery will celebrate its 35th Anniversary. The modest “portable bulletin board” is not only still in print and still profitable, it is now a fixture of the Maryland horse industry with a loyal and growing readership and a unique archive of content that documents our industry over the past three and a half decades.

Enjoy.